News is an unpublished account of human action, which seeks mainly to educate, inform, or entertain the readers. It may be written for any particular occasion, for any particular newspaper, publication, or merely as a collage of facts collected from different sources. The very first condition of news is that news must not have already been published elsewhere before. It must come to the public’s knowledge to the first instance. There can be no news of a general nature which the public has not heard of at all.
The news is a unique property of modern man, in that he watches, hears, reads, and talks about so many different things at such a fast pace that his receptiveness to each new form of communication is almost instantaneous. News is the only form of communication in which a man’s immediate experience does not guide him, and he may well react on an emotion based on what he has heard or read. It is this’emotionism’ which impart such a wide-range of different meanings to events, and especially to the words used to describe them. News conveys information to the public at such a rate and in such a variety that it imparts the impression of a widespread and ordinary interest in all matters whatever.
The present interest in current events, politics, sports events, international news, and other such fields, lends itself to much speculation, much gossip, and a great deal of manufactured news. Fake news and its dissemination among a section of the public in general, is probably the most pernicious of all the inventions of the modern century. The object of gossip is not, generally, to enlighten the public, but to injure another, either directly or indirectly. Gossip is generally reserved for relations between friends or neighbors, and the press is largely controlled by its employers, who lay stress on the fact that they are furnishing their workers with news and information which are as objective as possible.
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